of
Sir W. Jones", I. page 26, London, 1799.)

No such epoch-making discovery was probably ever announced with less
flourish of trumpets. Though Sir William Jones lived for eight years
more and delivered other anniversary discourses, he added nothing of
importance to this utterance. He had neither the time nor the health
that was needed for the prosecution of so arduous an undertaking.

But the good seed did not fall upon stony ground. The news was speedily
conveyed to Europe. By a happy chance, the sudden renewal of war between
France and England in 1803 gave Friedrich Schlegel the opportunity of
learning Sanscrit from Alexander Hamilton, an Englishman who, like many
others, was confined in Paris during the long struggle with Napoleon.
The influence of Schlegel was not altogether for good in the history of
this research, but he was inspiring. Not upon him but upon Franz Bopp,
a struggling German student who spent some time in Paris and London
a dozen years later, fell the mantle of Sir William Jones. In Bopp's
Comparative Grammar of the Indo-Germanic languages which appeared in
1833, three-quarters of a century ago, the foundations of Comparative
Philology were laid. Since that day the literature of the subject has
grown till it is almost, if not altogether, beyond the power of any
single man to cope with it. But long as the discourse may be, it is but
the elaboration of the text that Sir William Jones supplied.

With the publication of Bopp's Comparative Grammar the historical study
of language was put upon a stable footing. Needless to say much remained
to be done, much still remains to be done. More than once there has been
danger of the study following erroneous paths. Its terminology and its
point of view have in some degree changed. But nothing can shake the
truth of the statement that the Indo-Germanic languages constitute in
themselves a family sprung from the same source, marked by the same
characteristics, and differentiated from all other languages by
formation, by vocabulary, and by syntax. The historical method was
applied to language long before it reached biology. Nearly a quarter of
a century before Charles Darwin was born, Sir William Jones had made the
first suggestion of a comparative study of languages. Bopp's Comparative
Grammar began to be published nine years before the first draft of
Darwin's treatise on the Origin of Species was put on paper in 1842.

It is not therefore on the history of Com